


Dun

by DictionaryWrites2



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Fluff, Holding Hands, M/M, Retirement
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-11
Updated: 2019-05-11
Packaged: 2020-03-01 05:22:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18793846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DictionaryWrites2/pseuds/DictionaryWrites2
Summary: “You don’t suppose they’ve…?”“They can’t, can they?”“I don’t see why not.”“But that would stop us being…”“I’m not so sure it would.”





	Dun

He had been waiting, patiently. Or— He hadn’t, exactly. Neither waiting nor patience were especial watchwords for Anthony J. Crowley, and so what he’d really been doing was pacing around his flat waiting for words from on high – or, that is to say, on low. He hadn’t had words from on high for  _quite_  some time.

It’s been a few days.

All has, theoretically, gone back to normal.

All, except…

He flicked on the television, which had not been the most expensive in the shop, but  _had_  been the one with the most complicated remote, and that had rather appealed. He liked it when technology seemed very complicated to operate, and he ordinarily enjoyed the meditative nature of flicking through thirty buttons to do something as simple as turn the volume down a fraction.

Static played from the television.

“Hello?” he asked, cautiously, in the voice of one torn between hoping for one result or the other

No answer.

“Listen,” he said, “I’ve not had any orders, or any check-ins since… since it all went down, you know.”

No answer. The static buzzed, and Crowley began cycling through buttons. S4C, the Welsh-language television channel, flickered onto the screen, and he finally managed to turn the volume up slightly. He waited with bated breath for the melodic, easy sounds of Welsh to morph into the buzzing tones of one of his superiors.

It didn’t happen.

He flicked the television off, with only six wrong tries before he got the right button.

He’d been to the graveyard. Every other Tuesday was the meeting time, usually, and yet this Tuesday… No one. Nobody.

He moved toward the phone, but before he could reach for it, it rang, and he picked up the receiver, holding it to his ear.

“Angel,” Crowley said, “has nobody talked to you either?”

“Not a word,” Aziraphale said anxiously. He didn’t at all seem perturbed by the fact that Crowley knew who was calling. Perhaps he assumed that Crowley had some sort of technology to identify who was calling him[1]. “You don’t think…?”

“Well, he said put everything back to  _normal_ ,” Crowley said.

“More or less,” Aziraphale muttered, without faith. “Have you, er, tried… Tried any official mode of contact, yet?”

“No,” Crowley said. “Just talked to the television. Why?”

“Well, I— You know. I… I dialled the direct line, as it were.”

“And?”

“Well, my dear, I might as well have called a friend from a century ago. There’s not just no  _answer_. There’s no… There’s no  _tone_. Er— You know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” Crowley said woodenly.

Aziraphale’s voice was terse and stiff and quiet, and Crowley drummed his fingers against the side of his television unit, feeling the uncomfortable, crawling tension in his chest as the angel went on. “But I— You know, I’m not… I hardly think we’ve been demoted, as it were. I remain in possession of my graces, and indeed, my Graces[2].”

“Very good, angel,” Crowley muttered, without enthusiasm. “Yeah, I haven’t noticed anything, but…”

“You don’t suppose they’ve…?”

“They can’t, can they?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“But that would stop us being…”

“I’m not so sure it would.”

“How’d you mean?”

There was a long, complicated pause on the other end of the line, and Crowley fancied he could see Aziraphale’s lips moving as he rehearsed what it was he wanted to say, tasting the words before he loaned them voice. Finally, he answered, “If he wants us to be as we are – that is to say, an angel and a demon – we are, we will be, an angel and a demon. But he… Well. I think the boy rather a similar flaw to mine, in that, ahem, he can’t really resist fixing something, if it might be fixed. And I was… I was thinking, dear boy, were  _I_  in such a position, what I might have done is just taken us off the books.”

Crowley understood. He wasn’t sure he liked that understanding, however, and so he repeated, “Taken us off the…?”

“Create a blindspot, as it were,” Aziraphale continued, without hearing him. “We are what we are. They are as they are. And never the twain shall meet.”

Crowley considered this for a long moment. The idea was unspeakable. To be as they were, but without their respective connections to Heaven and Hell, to be… Well. To be—

Unspeakable was  _right_.

“Would you like to go for a drink?” Aziraphale asked, somewhat desperately.

“Oh, yes,” Crowley replied. “I’ll pick you up.”

\--

They didn’t actually bother to  _go_  anywhere.

They sat down in the park, on the green, on a picnic blanket. It was a warm day, clinging onto the dregs of summer, and while they split a bottle of wine between them, none of the passing policemen on their beat much liked the idea of coming to break up their date. One of them was in a suit, and the other was in a thick wool jumper – suffice to stay, taking their Lafitte off them doesn’t seem like much cop when there were much more interesting bystanders to harass around London.

“What do we  _do_?” Aziraphale asked.

“Dunno,” Crowley said. He took a sip of his wine, staring out over the duck pond. “Always  _thought_  about it. But I never really… I never really got as far as this point. I just thought, oh, wouldn’t it be nice…? And then thought about something else. Did you?”

“No,” Aziraphale said.

A beat passed. It spanned the silences of centuries.

“Yes,” he amended, guiltily, staring down at his knees, which were clad in sensible tan trousers. “But it was never going to  _happen_. I— What is one to do?”

“Same stuff as always, I suppose,” Crowley said. “Just without reporting it to the men upstairs. Er, in your case, of course.”

“That’s not really cricket, is it?” Aziraphale asked.

Crowley, who did not believe the term “that’s not cricket” had been used by anyone else for at least a hundred years, said, “No.”

“I mean,” Aziraphale went on, “what would the point be? If we did it without reporting on it?”

“Human decency, I suppose,” Crowley said softly. Saying it didn’t avert the deep and crushing existential terror that was threatening to thunder down around his eyes, but it did meet a small bloom of satisfaction unfurl its flowers in his breast. He could be… He could be A.J. Crowley. He could just  _be_ … Anthony Crowley. No odd wishes, no giving up his powers, or his immortality. Just— Just  _being_ , and not having to report back downstairs.

His head spun.

“If it isn’t recorded, it hardly exists,” Aziraphale said, not really hearing Crowley. He was several leagues inside his own head, and he found the weather very unpleasant indeed. “Ergo, there’s no point doing it. And I’m… That is to say, one does rather need a  _point_ , to exist.”

“Why?” Crowley asked. “ _They_  don’t.” This was said with a vague gesture at the city around them. It was somewhat devoid of its usual, natural scorn. Then, he added, in a quietly hopeful tone, “And there’s the Arrangement[3].”

“But there’s no  _point_  to it,” Aziraphale snapped, “if there aren’t sides that we’re  _on_. If we’re just— If we’re just you and me, dear boy, with the ties to our respective commands cut away, then the Arrangement becomes just that: you and me.”

“Yeah,” Crowley agreed, feeling himself grin. “Yeah, it does, doesn’t it?”

There was a long silence, and Crowley took a long sip of his drink, before glancing to his left, to see what had rendered Aziraphale silent. He followed Aziraphale’s downturned gaze, and his eyes alighted, through the dark lenses of his sunglasses, on his own hand. It was on top of Aziraphale’s, his fingers curled in to loosely clasp at it. The angel’s hand, Crowley noted, was quite warm, and his touch didn’t make Crowley’s body any more inclined to burst into flames, or to smoke, or do anything along those lines, than it usually was.

“Ah,” Aziraphale said. “Are you… Are you sure, my dear?”

“Nope,” Crowley said, with a grin. “I’m not sure of anything.” He squeezed. After another moment’s pause, Aziraphale’s hand shifted in his own, their fingers interlinking, and he heard Aziraphale exhale breathily. “D’you want to go to dinner?”

“Sushi?” Aziraphale asked, hopefully. He had scooted slightly closer, so that their shoulders were touching. If Crowley was a human, his cheeks would have flushed. He wasn’t one, but… What the Hell? He blushed anyway.

“Why not? Let’s… Let’s order just starters. Eat from the same plates.”

“We usually eat from the same plates,” Aziraphale said. By this, he meant, “I usually eat from  _your_  plate,” as Crowley did not have the same appetite Aziraphale did, and often left his food unfinished.

“Yes,” Crowley agreed. “Yes. But— But let’s make a spectacle of it.”

“We don’t know,” Aziraphale began.

“Yes, we do,” Crowley decided, and this was how he showed he’d decided: he leaned closer, so that his head rested on Aziraphale’s shoulder, still holding his hand. He could feel the heat of his flush burning his cheeks, and he could feel his body’s heart pumping a good deal more vigorously than usual. It was rather nice. “Yes,” he decided a second time, for good measure. “We  _do_.”

“Oh,” Aziraphale said, breathlessly. “Yes, I… I suppose we do.”

For a long, long few minutes, they sat there, drinking their wine. Crowley leaned his head against Aziraphale’s shoulder, and Aziraphale put his cheek in toward the top of it, enjoying the spiced scent of the product Crowley wore to soften his hair.  The sun began to set over Soho.

“Crowley?” Aziraphale asked.

“Hm?”

“Let’s split a dessert.” It was said with such reckless enthusiasm that Crowley heard himself laugh. Later on, Aziraphale would eat the whole thing, bar for a mouthful, because Crowley  _wasn’t_  actually one for dessert, but the point would be the  _look_  of the thing, the spectacle, and they would order it together.

“Alright,” he agreed, readily. He raised his wine glass. “To our godson, then. He did very well without our influence, didn’t he?”

“Yes,” Aziraphale said, raising his own glass, and letting it clink against Crowley’s. “We should… We should visit him.”

“Would be nice to do,” Crowley mused. “What with us being— Being retired, and all.”

“ _Yes_ ,” Aziraphale agreed. They drained their glasses. “Retired!”

“We could buy a cottage in Tadfield, and go there on weekends,” Crowley said impulsively. “Dunroamin.”

“Dunmiracling.”

“Dundemoning.”

“Dunangeling.”

“Dun.”

“Dun!”

They sat together in the silence, and as one, they fell back on the grass, staring up at the reddening skies, and feeling the warmth of each other’s palms, pressed tight together. In the stars, Crowley could divine no purpose at all.

It was unspeakable.

It was  _wonderful_.

 

[1] In fact, Crowley did, but he hadn’t looked at it. He hadn’t needed to.

[2] One might mistakenly believe that one cannot capitalize words in spoken conversation, but Aziraphale rather had the knack.

[3] Crowley, too, was able to capitalise words with his voice alone, although he ordinarily needed to have heard Aziraphale performing the practice first. Luckily, he usually had.


End file.
